A generalized low-density parity check code (GLDPC) is a low-density parity check code in which the constraint nodes of the code graph are block codes, rather than single parity checks. In this paper, we study GLDPC codes which have BCH or Reed-Solomon codes as subcodes under bounded distance decoding (BDD). The performance of the proposed scheme is investigated in the limit case of an infinite length (cycle free) code used over a binary erasure channel (BEC) and the corresponding thresholds for iterative decoding are derived. The performance of the proposed scheme for finite code lengths over a BEC is investigated as well. Structures responsible for decoding failures are defined and a theoretical analysis over the ensemble of GLDPC codes which yields exact bit and block error rates of the ensemble average is derived. Unfortunately this study shows that GLDPC codes do not compare favorably with their LDPC counterpart over the BEC. Fortunately, it is also shown that under certain conditions, objects identified in the analysis of GLDPC codes over a BEC and the corresponding theoretical results remain useful to derive tight lower bounds on the performance of GLDPC codes over a binary symmetric channel (BSC). Simulation results show that the proposed method yields competitive performance with a good decoding complexity trade-off for the BSC.

A generalized low-density parity check code (GLDPC) is a low-density parity check code in which the constraint nodes of the code graph are block codes, rather than single parity checks. In this paper, we study GLDPC codes which have BCH or Reed-Solomon codes as subcodes. The performance of the proposed scheme is investigated on a BEC and BSC for infinite and finite code lengths. The analysis shows that the performance of the scheme on a BEC is poor compared to that of LDPC codes. However, the performance on a BSC is competitive to that of LDPC codes. Furthermore, results of the finite length analysis on a BEC can be used under certain conditions as a tight lower bound on the performance of the scheme on a BSC.

In this correspondence, a new method for improving hard-decision bit-flipping decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is presented. Bits with a number of unsatisfied check sums larger than a predetermined threshold are flipped with a probability p /spl les/ 1 which is independent of the code considered. The probability p is incremented during decoding according to some rule. With a proper choice of the initial p, the proposed improved bit-flipping (BF) algorithm achieves gain not only in performance, but also in average decoding time for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values of interest with respect to p = 1.